Oldal 28 [28]
26 | Zoltan Simon
opinion polls force politicians to defeat their opponents (and reassure their
supporters) month by month, and week by week. This continuous political
horse-racing further narrows the perspective of political and policy decisions,
favouring short-term public opinion gains over longer-term social benefits,
often at the expense of necessary reforms.
The very same entertainment logic is behind the emergence of ‘celebrity
politics’ with celebrity politicians and politicised celebrities (see e.g. Wheeler
2013). Political actors complain about their privacy being invaded by paparazzi
journalism. However, in reality, this is a two-way road. As newspapers
are often more interested in politicians’ private life than in their political
views, politicians, being aware of this, also facilitate, or even encourage the
mediatisation of intimacy. All this requires considerable investment in their
communication teams and media relations, resulting in a symbiosis between
political and media actors due to their mutual dependencies and partially
overlapping interests.
The Internet and the social media revolution are transforming European
politics even more than traditional media did. They reinforce individualisation,
but also generate new, though virtual, connections and communities. The
initial enthusiasm about the positive political impact of social media ¬
associated with the Arab Spring in particular at an early stage - is over by
now. Not only due to the robust digital divide within and between countries,
but also to the high risks of potential manipulations of these platforms. The
indigestible quantity of information that citizens are flooded with on a daily
basis, combined with their deepening distrust of authorities in the large sense
of the term, make many of them feel lost and disoriented, and vulnerable
to deception.
This vulnerability is also exploited by the rising “facts industry” (Zielonka
2018, 27). In some cases, the data gathered and processed by these actors
help citizens grasp the reality, while they often mislead them. There is a high
potential for purpose-driven manipulation through the dissemination of bias
or false information, also called fake news. The damage is often magnified by
the retreat of many citizens into echo chambers. As described by Julian Baggini:
By retreating into bubbles of the like-minded, people can strip out a lot of inconvenient
complexities a wider perspective would give, leading to a simpler but therefore
also distorted network of belief. Falsehood masquerades as truth by retreating into
incomplete networks of belief where convenient facts are overstated and inconvenient
ones ignored or just simply denied. (Baggini 2017, 102)
Against this backdrop, future prospects are worrisome indeed. As Jamie
Susskind says in his Future Politics: people's choices and actions are based on
their external perceptions, which are always limited and can be influenced
through the filtering of information they have access to. In the 20" century, this
filtering was mostly done by mass media. Today, the emergence of the Internet,